New Look in Skyscrapers Revives Quarries

A ridge of granite rises out of Long Island Sound here, forming the group of islands known as the Thimbles 10 miles up the coast from New Haven, then running under I-95 and north four miles before slipping again beneath the surface.

For more than 100 years, quarriers cut loaves of the pink stone out of the top of a hill overlooking the sound and, after slicing it into panels, shipped it to construction sites around the Northeast. But as glass and concrete replaced stone as the materials of choice for the exterior of office buildings, the Stony Creek quarry, like much of the rest of the American stone industry, slid gradually into oblivion.

Suddenly, in 1979, Philip Johnson, the architect whose famous glass house in New Canaan in 1949 had helped push stone so much out of fashion, delivered a stay of execution. As the designer, with John Burgee, of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's tower on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, Mr. Johnson shattered his own International Style tradition. He decided to dress the headquarters skyscraper of the world's largest corporation in 1.3 million square feet of Stony Creek pink.

''Without that order, we would all be selling candy bars today,'' said Gerald Castellucci Jr., general manager of the family-held company that owns the quarry. The Postmodern Movement

The Johnson-Burgee design ended the era of the glass box for American skyscrapers. It helped bring back into vogue the cornices, arches and lintels of classical design, a trend that has come to be known as the Postmodern Movement. As it rekindled interest in the use of stone, it also sparked a revival of the stone-fabrication business, one of the country's oldest industries. For the first time since the Depression, the stone fabricators are enjoying an upswing in the market.

''Over the last 10 years, the price of glass has risen sharply while the price of granite has fallen,'' said Barry Donaldson, vice president of the Tishman Research Company, a unit of the Tishman Realty and Construction Company, a contractor based in New York.

Builders have also learned to attach granite panels much more quickly, allowing more rapid completion of the interior of a building. Even though a square foot of granite still costs more than a square foot of glass, ''there is virtually no difference for a developer in the cost of the two materials,'' he said.

In this tiny industry with a very visible product, demand has shot skyward, from a low of 134,000 tons in 1977 to 880,000 tons in 1985, according to the United States Bureau of Mines. Old quarries have reopened and new equipment has allowed production and productivity to soar. From Barre, Vt., to Marble Falls, Tex., cutters and polishers have returned to work with equipment purchased from Italian and West German manufacturers to reclaim the American stone industry.

The stone industry includes some 200 companies in 36 states, according to the Bureau of Mines, with production centered in Georgia, Indiana and Vermont. Though they vary in size from mom-and-pop gravestone makers to vertically integrated producers, few companies in the industry employ more than 100 people. In fact, the bureau lists only 14,000 workers in the entire stone industry, the same number as five years ago. With an overall market of less than $500 million annually, no one company or group of companies dominates the business.

Despite the spectacular growth since 1982, the domestic producers have barely begun to recapture their share of the business. European stone companies, primarily Italian producers, still provide more than 68 percent of the granite sold for use in building construction in the United States. American quarriers and fabricators control a far larger share of the market for headstones, highway work and monuments - the more stable, if less profitable, portion of the industry. Europeans Accused

Last week, three of the largest stone companies in the United States, the Cold Spring Granite Company, the Capital Marble and Granite Company and the North Carolina Granite Company, accused the Italian and Spanish Governments of subsidizing their building-stone industries. As a result, they said, the foreign producers have been able to sell their granite in the United States at less than fair value.

In a petition to the United States International Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce, the companies asked that protective duties be imposed on imported granite to be used in buildings.

The foreign producers have not yet responded to the complaint. Even if the Commerce Department finds in favor of the granite producers, no penalties would be imposed until next summer at the earliest. But the petition offers an indication that domestic producers are fighting to expand their market share while the dollar remains weak and the demand strong.

For Castellucci & Sons, the revival started the day the A.T.&T. order came in eight years ago. Annual sales rose from $700,000 in 1978 to more than $3 million five years later. This year, the total may reach $15 million, even though growth in production and changes in technology have cut the market price for finished granite in half. Office Tower Project

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Since the A.T.&T. project, the blush of Stony Creek granite has covered such monumental structures as the Philip Morris headquarters in New York, the Hartford Fire Insurance building in Simsbury, Conn., and the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Castellucci is now cutting the stone panels for the Columbus Center project, the huge office tower to be built on the site of the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, and for a new city jail on White Street in lower Manhattan.

Before changes in taste caused demand to soar, the American quarry industry had all but disappeared. Dozens of family-owned businesses around the country had folded. ''We had a lot of payless paydays around here,'' Mr. Castellucci said.

Builders came more and more to depend on Italian and Scandinavian suppliers for the small amount of decorative stone used in construction, most of it in the lobbies of office buildings and in churches. European producers gradually developed technology for both quarries and finishing plants that allowed them to slice stone in ever-thinner slabs.

By 1980, many European fabricators could manufacture granite and marble panels with the thickness of ceramic tiles, less than one-half inch. American producers, with their antiquated saws and labor-intensive polishing methods, had not yet broken through the two-inch barrier.

''The thicker the slab, the heavier,'' said Mr. Castellucci, ''and the heavier the slab the more costly the support and anchor systems.'' A History in New York

Despite the double thickness and double cost, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee insisted on Stony Creek granite for their client. No stone had played a more important role in New York's history. Stony Creek panels formed the base of the Statue of Liberty and Grand Central Terminal. Blocks of Stony Creek pink supported the Brooklyn and Queensboro Bridges and decorated the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University.

The stone itself was formed more than 400 million years ago from molten rock, according to Brian J. Skinner, a professor of geology and geophysics at Yale University, who visits the quarry each year with his students. Above it stood a mountain range with peaks more than 30,000 feet tall. The mountains have since eroded, leaving the crest of the granite formation exposed.

Cladding the new A.T.&T. tower in granite cost more than twice as much as a glass curtain wall would have. But those were the days before the deregulation of the telecommunications industry, when money was no object for A.T.&T.

By the time the panels were ready to be attached, the cost of a stone wall had reached $70 a square foot, including the cost of installation, according to Mr. Donaldson. The most expensive glass wall system might have cost less than $35 a square foot. 'Image of Nobility' Sought

''A.T.&T. insisted they wanted something other than just another glass box,'' Mr. Burgee said last week. ''We were looking for something that projected the company's image of nobility and strength. No material does that better than granite.''

The profits from the A.T.&T. contract gave Castellucci money for capital improvements. At the quarry, the company abandoned its derricks and construction cranes in favor of a front-end loader that could shove rubble out of the way or pick up a 45,000-pound block of granite in its scoop.

In all, Castellucci invested $800,000 at the quarry after the A.T.&T. job and doubled its number of workers to 14. Production jumped from less than 4,000 cubic feet a month, or 340 tons, in 1984, to more than 13,000 feet, or 1,100 tons, now.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 1987, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: New Look in Skyscrapers Revives Quarries. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe